Tuning sound for infrastructures: artificial intelligence, automation, and the cultural politics of audio mastering.

This paper traces the infrastructural politics of automated music mastering to reveal how contemporary iterations of artificial intelligence (AI) shape cultural production. The paper examines the emergence of LANDR, an online platform that offers automated music mastering, built on top of supervised...

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Publicado en:Cultural Studies Vol. 35; no. 4/5; pp. 750 - 771
Autores principales: Sterne, Jonathan, Razlogova, Elena
Formato: Artículo
Publicado: Taylor & Francis Ltd Jul-Sep2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:Ver este registro en EBSCOhost
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        10.1080/09502386.2021.1895247
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        atl: Tuning sound for infrastructures: artificial intelligence, automation, and the cultural politics of audio mastering.
      aug:
        au:
          Sterne, Jonathan
          Razlogova, Elena
        affil:
          Department of Art History and Communication Studies, McGill University, Montreal, Canada
          Department of History, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada
      su:
        Mastering (Sound recordings)
        Artificial intelligence
        Automation
        Cultural production
        Machine learning
        Technology & culture
      sug:
        subj:
          Mastering (Sound recordings)
          Artificial intelligence
          Automation
          Cultural production
          Machine learning
          Technology & culture
      keyword:
        culture and technology
        data
        machine learning
        music mastering
      ab: This paper traces the infrastructural politics of automated music mastering to reveal how contemporary iterations of artificial intelligence (AI) shape cultural production. The paper examines the emergence of LANDR, an online platform that offers automated music mastering, built on top of supervised machine learning branded as artificial intelligence. Increasingly, machine learning will become an integral part of signal processing for sounds and images, shaping the way media cultures sound, look, and feel. While LANDR is a product of the so-called 'big bang' in machine learning, it could not exist without specific conditions: specific kinds of commensurable data, as well as specific aesthetic and industrial conditions. Mastering, in turn, has become an indispensable but understudied part of music circulation as an infrastructural practice. Here we analyze the intersecting histories of machine learning and mastering, as well as LANDR's failure at automating other domains of audio engineering. By doing so, we critique the discourse of AI's inevitability and show the ways in which machine learning must frame or reframe cultural and aesthetic practices in order to automate them, in service of digital distribution, recognition, and recommendation infrastructures.
      pubtype: Academic Journal
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    language: English
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      custom: Copyright of Cultural Studies is the property of Taylor & Francis Ltd and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites without the copyright holder's express written permission. Additionally, content may not be used with any artificial intelligence tools or machine learning technologies. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.
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